Gallery openings in St. Louis

A modest attempt to list gallery openings in the visual arts in St. Louis

(Searching by date is probably the best way to find all events for a particular day)

Friday, April 29, 2016

3011 Keokuk Street: Saturday, 14 May 2014

cream Peter

Opening Saturday, May 14, 2016 7-11 PM

A group pop-up exhibition featuring works from Jackson Bullock, Catalina Ouyang, Dani Radoshevich and Carla Steppan. Free to the public. Refreshments will be served.

cream Peter is a celebration of ends, or beginnings, or something. It is the collaborative labor of four (f)art school peers, new-ish friends, WUSTL brats, united in their plans to JUST LEAVE [this city, this region]. cream Peter is a premature goodbye, hosted in a ubiquitous brick box house: the well-loved home of Dani! cream Peter is a hiss of rage and howl of longing. cream Peter is our grandfathers, ex-lovers and loitering ghosts; cream Peter is see all you losers, somewhere else, later.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

CAM: Friday, 6 May 2016

Public Reception: 7:00–9:00 pm

This summer,
experience contemporary art from St. Louis to the internationally
renowned as CAM presents the 2016 Great
Rivers Biennial, featuring new work by local artists Lyndon Barrois Jr., Nanette Boileau,
and Tate Foley;
the museum debut of Mark Bradford’s installation Receive Calls on Your Cell Phone
From Jail; new video work by Lili
Reynaud-Dewar; art by students in the New Art in
the Neighborhood program; and an immersive hanging garden
by Nomad Studio (opening
May 21).

Philip Slein Gallery: Friday, 20 May 2016

Many factors enter into making a work of art. One of those factors, one often never considered by the viewer, is scale. Today exhibition spaces are built huge to accommodate works of art in sizes that would never have been considered ordinary fifty or a hundred years ago. Yet large-scale works of art often start small-- sketches, models, variations. And some artists choose to work solely in small scale, for them the most intimate and engaging way to portray their thoughts. All the works in this exhibition contain ideas, the core ideas that make "art" something more than the materials and the time invested in making it. Artists in the exhibition include John Dilg, Lori Ellison, Keltie Ferris, Tony Fitzpatrick, Alison Hall, Nicholas Krushenick, Jonathan Lasker, Eva Lundsager, Ann Pibal, Andrew Masullo, Suzanne McClelland, Wardell Milan, Thomas Nozkowski, Carl Ostendarp, Jackie Saccoccio, James Siena, Cary Smith, Gary Stephan, Chuck Webster, and John Zinsser.

By focusing on small-scale painting this exhibition attempts to show the power of visual ideas which the viewer can only appreciate by approaching the work of art, engaging it, and thereby entering into dialogue with it.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

duet: Friday, 6 May 2016

Brandon Engstrom (Los Angeles)
and Kevin (St. Louis)

May 6 - July 9, 2016

Opening Reception: Friday, May 6,
6pm-8pm

Duet’s
new show separates out the artistic production methods. Kevin produced
by an anonymous collective based in St Louis in Duet’s front room crawlspace
echoes the bunker-like interior of the gallery. Each object inside is an
individual record of the Kevin entity, yet the whole production of ephemera
forms a potentially limitless crowd. Kevin’s teeming underground existence
physically defines a dank occluded mental space. These are notes from the
underground: “What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness
that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have
left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path” by an
underground figure as absurd as he is obscure. “to meet peril and danger,
compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking
the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another
difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness…” In the end Kevin is
watching. As the viewer chasing a fugitive sensation you become the ‘pursuant’
for your own conscience.

Engstrom’s
installation depicts a “Tearing and consuming” of cast candy female buttocks by
a ratline of nocturnal rodents. Engstrom stored his carb-rich sculptures in a
gritty apartment in LA’s K-town. He was shocked to find that the sculptures
were gnawed at each night. Smaller residents, living in the wall recesses
of the building became his harshest critics literally consuming his
work. Undeterred by the setback he set up cameras and recorded the
grizzly cannibalization “till the bitterness turns into a sort of shameful
accursed sweetness, and at last – into positive real enjoyment!” Much like the
narrator in Notes from the Underground who explores the enjoyment of Toothache
as a willfully irrational act of defiance, Engstrom uses the insatiable appetites
of rodents to determine his own uncertainty and hesitations.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Duane Reed Gallery: Friday, 20 May 2016

Duane Reed Gallery proudly presents the work of Ron Johnson and Griff Williams; painters whose works both transcend and defy expectations through the use of resinous fluid as opposed to traditional acrylic or oil pigments. The application of resins and enamels of varying viscosities create enticing surface qualities that put pre-conceived ideas of painting on their head. Both artists use pre planned mapping to determine where the various sections of color will be placed. In Johnson’s work, lines are laid down to act as dams for the polyurethane to settle in to their intended shape, and then sanded down to create the desired visual effect. William’s pieces require highly technical pigment mixing with transparent resin, and then poured into place on stenciled enamel in an elaborately reinvented paint by numbers process.

RON JOHNSON - Johnson’s work explores abstracted landscapes through a process of layering that is both soft and semi-transparent, giving the viewer a topographical perspective of exuberant colors and strategically placed line. “The medium allows me to control this idea of translucency which in turn allows the viewer to access my work in layers. So viewers are literally able to see the archaeology, or experience my thoughts, in an archaeology of seeing.”

GRIFF WILLIAMS - William’s paintings are created through a process of layering poured resin and enamel in a process very similar to paint-by-numbers. “The shapes are used in intersecting layers to compose an image, which camouflages the boundaries between things. I’m intrigued by the impermanence of form. The paintings present an extravagant visionary experience – a blend of the material and the optical. This calculated technique speaks of setting aside the romanticism of the past.”

The exhibition will be on view from May 20th through June 25th, with an opening reception Friday, May 20th, from 5 – 8pm. Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 10-5pm.

This exhibit showcases the talents of Artists Informed by Time. A juried exhibit, this show was open to artists aged 70+ who, by making art, share their thoughts & ideas about the world and themselves with us.

For this exhibit, 163 artworks were submitted by 71 St. Louis regional artists for consideration by exhibition Jurors Lynn Friedman Hamilton and Meredith Malone from which they selected 54 artworks by 57 artists from Missouri and Illinois for the final show.

William Shearburn Gallery: Friday, 13 May 2016

hotographer Michael Eastman debuts Derivation, a series of impressionistic photographs celebrating the beauty of St. Louis’ Forest Park, at William Shearburn Gallery in St. Louis on May 13.

A self-taught photographer, Eastman is known for his large-scale photographs that document architecture in cities ranging from Havana to Rome. The works in Derivation revisit one of Eastman’s earliest subjects: Forest Park.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman had documented the park regularly: its people, the water, the flora, and ultimately its decline into crumbling walls and overgrowth. Eastman’s 1992 book The Forgotten Forest, supported by the then-new conservancy Forest Park Forever, walked its viewer through the park in melancholy black and white.

The photographs in Derivation capture in full color a dramatically different, restored Forest Park of present. These are a formal departure from Eastman’s past work, being shot sans tripod with a 35mm digital camera while walking on foot. To achieve the images’ stippled surfaces, Eastman devised a “metaphorical lens” for his camera, made from pieces of antique glass found at yard sales and souvenir shops. He says of this method, “I wanted to develop a kind of print that was new, my own, and a completely different take on the park.”

Eastman works intuitively within this process. The resulting visual effect traverses a hybrid territory between photography and painting. Eastman refers to this method as an “impressionistic camera,” as the images evoke those plein-air landscapes while being produced via photographic means. Eastman describes them as “about sculpture and texture and color and surface,” celebrating their spontaneity and accessibility.

Thinning boundaries
between psychology, politics and intuition, two artists respond to identities
coalescing around dreams, ghosts and historical memories. In her clay
chimera, sculptor Ruth Reese unites human with animal, and flora to
fauna. Her fantastical humanoid forms become extended, and sometimes overcome
as they engage a spiritual agency beyond the human. Surreal and
creaturely, these sculptures live on the margin of dreams. Reese
invites a diversity of characters into these fairytale tropes. At the
same time, printmaker Sam Vernon creates a Gothic visual art in which
black narratives expand the genre. Vernon xeroxes, draws and collages
leaving her work with soft disappearing marks, a technique aptly termed
"ghosting". The drawing then becomes a shadowy and evolving
memory of its original self. Her silhouette in absence becomes a vehicle
or mask - in which she is able to create a meta-history of post-colonial
investigations. This exhibition brings together many of the varied and
mysterious faces of our collective unconscious as it re-interprets the timeless
art-form of the mask for contemporary audiences.

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Clayton Fine Art Gallery: Friday, 8 April 2016

Wolves in
Clayton Mike Barry's
Wildlife & Nature Photography

Michael T. BarryWildlife & Nature Photography

Nature has an abundance to offer everyone as does Michael
T. Barry's photography. From magnificent white wolves to mystical
dragonfly's and butterflies, to majestic vistas, Michael Barry has
captured it in his photography.

Exhibition dates:
March 27th through May 7th

Please join us for this Special Event ReceptionFriday April 8th
from6:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Friday, April 01, 2016

Pulitzer Arts Foundation: Friday, 15 April 2016

Ellipsis invites you to listen, look, touch, taste, and pause--celebrating the senses and embracing a range of individual and collective experiences with art. The exhibition brings out unexpected variations in perception, interaction, and awareness, featuring works by Janet Cardiff, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Odilon Redon, Roman Ondák, John Bresland, Thylias Moss, and the debut of a commissioned work by John Lucas and Claudia Rankine, in addition to a rotating selection of works by Doris Salcedo, Jean (Hans) Arp, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Gedi Sibony, and Mark Rothko.

Hoffman LaChance Contemporary: Friday, 8 april 2016

Brad Loudenback

Opening reception 6-9 pm, artist talk 7 pm
"The collages in this exhibition are interpretations of various cities across Europe. While working and traveling in Europe, I realized the method of assembling collages - with overlapping bits of paper and layers of transparent vellum - was analogous to the way cities are built and well suited to convey the story of rival cultural narratives as they merge over time. Yet, I think of these works more like color poems than historical analysis. Through juxtaposition and displacement these works allude to periods of turbulent history; but also convey ideas of harmonious adaptation in the effect of the designs."